In Part 1 of this series, we introduced our perspective on crowdsourced workforce virtualization as an alternative workforce model that promises to create a nimbler enterprise. A transformation as big as this—from a traditional workforce structure to a much heavier reliance on crowdsourcing and dynamic labor markets—can be challenging to carry out. It requires the mastery of new workforce mindsets and methodologies, along with the adoption of technologies from a rapidly evolving landscape. Various forms of work also require distinct tools and techniques.

Most enterprises will begin slowly, identifying simple tasks to virtualize before moving on to more challenging forms of work to assign to the crowd as their mastery of workforce virtualization grows. At the Labs, we are exploring what first steps are possible and next steps look fruitful to realize the full potential of this transformation. (See Figure 1.)

First steps

What is possible now with existing technologies?

What does the existing technology landscape look like?

What can an enterprise do with it?

Next steps

What could be feasible soon?

What further innovation is needed to mature the workforce virtualization paradigm?

What will it take to industrialize this approach to getting work done?

What is needed to cover the full range work that Accenture and our clients want to virtualize?

Figure 1: Steps for transitioning to workforce virtualization
To answer these questions, we have been studying the landscape of relevant commercial technologies, running some hands-on experiments, and building out tools and techniques for addressing the issues uncovered by those experiments.

Evaluating the technology landscape
The crowdsourcing space has become broad, which can make it confusing to track and analyze the dozens of commercial vendors and conceptual approaches. To help evaluate the options and formulate specific strategies for enterprises, we have developed a four-dimensional framework for understanding vendors and approaches. (See Figure 2.)

While the basic principles of crowdsourcing and workforce virtualization are not inherently complex, the framework shows that there are many interesting variations in how these principles can be combined to support different kinds of work. This is one reason why there has been a proliferation of commercial platforms, as shown in Figure 3.

For the enterprise

Tools/Platform

Description

Examples

Micro-task labor markets

Public digital talent markets that allow task owners to stream many very small tasks (such as classifying a photograph or sentence). Support human-in-the-loop computation.

Self-service micro-task markets:

Amazon Mechanical Turk, CrowdFlower, Clickworker

Managed service for micro-task market:

Crowdsource, Samasource, cloudfactory, Lionbridge, iMerit

Skilled freelancer labor markets

Public digital talent markets that connect task owners with specialized experts across a broad range of skills.

Upwork, Freelancer, Guru

Contest-based labor markets

Public digital talent markets that source work through competitions in which multiple people perform a task or solve a problem, and a prize is awarded to the entrant who supplies the best results.

Design

99Designs, DesignCrowd

Programming/Analytics

TopCoder

Innovation

Innocentive

Specialized talent markets and services

Public crowd markets that are focused on a specific function, such as security testing, functional testing or data science.

Crowdsourced testing

Applause, PassBrains, Bug Bounty

Other

TopCoder, Kaggle

Online collaboration platforms

Support mechanisms to facilitate discussion, sharing and hand-off of work products. Includes social collaboration, file-oriented collaboration and audio/video/screen share collaboration tools.

Enterprise social collaboration

Yammer, Microsoft SharePoint, Jive

Desktop chat and conferencing

Microsoft Lync, Slack, Google Hangouts

File/document sharing

Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, OneDrive

Figure 3: Types of commercial workforce virtualization technologies

Experiments to build a toolkit and platform
At the Labs, we see commercial platforms as basic ingredients of a workforce virtualization toolkit. Many enterprises are already experimenting with these technologies in small ways. However, we have not yet seen a systemic approach to leveraging these ingredients to reimagine major portions of today’s work processes. This kind of comprehensive capability, supported by a full-fledged platform that brings new and existing ingredients together, is what we are pushing toward now. (See Figure 4). To build an Accenture platform, we are experimenting with various forms of crowdsourced workforce virtualization to identify what works well. Then we are developing experimental tools and techniques to mature our capability.

As part of our effort, we are adding functionality to the platform through the following projects, using a combination of commercial technologies and components that we needed to build out ourselves. (See Figure 5.)

Project

Purpose

Crowd-powered data enrichment

Support workflows that combine micro-task crowd work with automation to enrich unstructured data into support business needs.

Self-service talent markets

Improve utilization and engagement of the workforce by facilitating best match between task and talent..

{"GetBlogPosts-return":{"author-list": [{"Name":"David Sun and Alex Kass ","Short_Description":"","Long_Description":"","Url_Bio":"","Url_Image":"","Social_Linked_In":"","Social_Twitter":"https://twitter.com/intent/user?screen_name=","Social_Email":"mailto:","AuthorId":"{EFA3BF4C-D8F9-42AF-93C3-D2190D804545}"}], "tag-list": [],"recentpost-list": [{"PostTitle":"Putting Crowdsourcing to Work for the Enterprise (Part 2)","PostUrl":"/us-en/blogs/blogs-putting-crowdsourcing-work-enterprise-part-2"},{"PostTitle":"Putting Crowdsourcing to Work for the Enterprise (Part 1)","PostUrl":"/us-en/blogs/blogs-putting-crowdsourcing-work-enterprise-part-1"},{"PostTitle":"Putting Crowdsourcing to Work for the Enterprise (Part 2)","PostUrl":"/us-en/blogs/blog-putting-crowdsourcing-to-work-for-theenterprise-part-2"}], "year-published-list": [{"year":"2018"},{"year":"2017"},{"year":"2016"},{"year":"2015"},{"year":"2014"}], "blog-archive-link": ""}}

Already applied to a job?

Sign in with e-mail and password

Validation summary

Invalid username / password

Comment submitted

Submitted comment may not display automatically.

Comment submitted

Submitted comment may not display automatically.

There is already a separate, active Accenture Careers account with the same email address as your LinkedIn account email address. Please try logging in with your registered email address and password. You can then update your LinkedIn sign-in connection through the Edit Profile section.

There is already a separate, active account tied to your LinkedIn profile. Please continue registration for this program without your LinkedIn profile or use a different LinkedIn account or email address.